For thirty years I dreamed of a life as a professional writer. Here's how it is for me, after twenty-three years. There's plenty about work in progress, a whole lot more about the things that feed my creative process.

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Monday, 17 November 2014

A Tour of Nebraska – and a Link to Buffalo Bill

Having now handed Chasing
Black Gold over to the publisher, I am free to turn my attention to plans
that have been on the back burner for some time. Highest on my list of
priorities has been to think about that rash announcement I made a few months
ago, that I would make a tour of Nebraska
in 2015, promoting The Red House On The
Niobrara through a series of lectures. A road-show, no less.

Fortunately, a bit of head-scratching reminded me of the cardinal rule to be obeyed when
planning foolish ventures in far-off places: work your contacts.

Over the past twenty years or so I have made a number of
good friends in Nebraska. One of
them is a descendant of the Arent family, the Danish homesteaders who built the
red house about ninety years ago. He has been delivering copies of the book to
friends, to neighbouring ranchers I got to know when I was out in the Sandhills,
to scholars in the field, to librarians and hoteliers and the like. Another
contact, whom I met at the Mari Sandoz conference in 2010, has urged me to
think about giving talks in Boulder,
where she lives, and Denver, also
of course Lincoln, where I have a
number of contacts.

All this throws up the matter of self-promotion, and how to
achieve the biggest splash. As I think about the kind of material I want to get
out there I am forced to conclude that I must exploit, shamelessly, the man who
first got me interested in the Wild West – namely, William F Cody.

I was about five years old when I became aware that we had
in our family a set of autographed photos of him and Annie Oakley. They came
from my great-great uncle, John Wiltshire, who captained the ship that
transported the Wild West Show across the Atlantic on at
least one occasion. We always understood that it was the State of Nebraska,
and as my studies led me to the Cornhusker state in the early 1990s, that
seemed so very appropriate – as if my love of Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz, and
thecountry they wrote about, was simply
meant to be.

Many years later, when I was deep in my researches, I found
that this story was a myth. The ship in question was under the command of one Captain
Braes – and, upon its return voyage, of a Captain Bristow.I was, of course, bitterly disappointed. But
while I was livingthe red house, out
there in the Sandhills, I was shown this passage in a biography of Little Miss
Sure-Shot:

‘Shortly before Christmas, 1893, Annie Oakley and Frank
Butler moved into their new house at 304 Grant Avenue
[in Nutley, New Jersey]….
Less than a week after moving in, the Butlers
had dinner guests, an event that was duly noted in the social columns of the
local newspapers. Invited were J. M. Brown, manager of the Atlantic Transport
Company of New York; Louis E Cooke of the Barnum and Bailey Show; and a Mr. and
Mrs. Cannon of Newark. Mr. Cannon was a noted one-armed sportsman. Also
invited was Captain Wiltshire of the steamship Mohawk, which had carried the
Wild West home from Europe the year before.’

So it was true, after all. I aim to extract maximum
benefit from that as I sit and draft my publicity material.

Another of the books I've produced as a result of my experiences in Nebraska and the Great Plains

Now available on amazon

Who is Alan Wilkinson?

I live in Durham, England. I have made a living as a writer since the early 1990s. While I earn my bread and butter ghosting biographies, writing corporate histories and the like, my main literary and historical interests lie in the American West. I have made getting on for twenty major road trips out there in the last 35 years, crossing the region from north to south and east to west a dozen times. I have lived in New Mexico, where I studied writing under Chicano author Rudy Anaya, and on a cattle-ranch in Nebraska. The Red House On The Niobrara came out of that experience. My 1994 bike ride across Nebraska is the subject of 'There Used To Be A Guy... But He Died.' It was a 5000-mile road-trip from Mexico to Canada and back which gave me the material for Between the Rockies and a Hard Place. In April this year (2017) my first novel, Cody, The Medicine Man and Me, was published by Ouen Press.

Six months on a cattle ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills

Blizzards, locusts, gully-washers, rattlesnakes, round-ups... I had them all in my 6-month stay in a tumbledown hunting lodge on the western Great Plains. So slap a T-bone steak on the camp-fire, pull up a log, and read on....